Texas Rape Victim Was Jailed for Fear She Would Not Testify, Lawsuit Says

A rape victim who was jailed in Texas for nearly a month because prosecutors feared she would not return to testify after having a mental breakdown on the stand has sued the Harris County district attorney’s office, county officials and jail employees.

The woman, identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, was held in the general population at the county jail — the same place where the rape suspect, Keith Hendricks, was housed. There, the suit says, she was misclassified as the perpetrator of a sexual assault — not as a victim — attacked by an inmate, denied medication and punched in the face by a guard.

Jane Doe’s treatment amounted to “an absolute deprivation of her personal integrity,” her lawyer, Sean Buckley, said in an interview Thursday. “As a rape victim, the psychological trauma she experienced was an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness.”

“And if you take out the sexual violation itself and you look at the underlying psychological trauma,” he added, “this is exactly what these defendants did to her again while she was still in recovery for her rape.”

According to the suit filed Monday in United States District Court in Houston, the woman began testifying in December against the man she said had choked, beaten and raped her two years earlier. The woman has bipolar disorder, the suit says, and did not finish her testimony.

In what the district attorney later called “an extraordinarily difficult and unusual situation,” because of concern she would not return to the courtroom, a judge had her locked up until the trial resumed, even though she was not charged with a crime.

A spokesman for the Harris County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Thursday, though prosecutors and the Harris County sheriff’s office have defended their decisions.

The decision raises questions about the treatment of people with mental health disorders in the Texas justice system and about the wisdom of jailing someone already victimized and traumatized by a suspect the district attorney called “a serial rapist.”

But the move was not unheard of. In a case in Sacramento, Calif., prosecutors in 2012 demanded that a 17-year-old victim of sexual assault be held in juvenile detention to ensure that she showed up to testify at the trial of her alleged attacker. She had failed to appear at two previous hearings. But a judge decided about a month later that she could be released and monitored by a GPS device.

Advocates for sexual assault survivors said they feared that the Texas case could have a chilling effect on other victims’ willingness to speak up.

The case was originally reported by KPRC-TV, a local television station.

The woman was sent to St. Joseph’s Medical Center for 10 days after she broke down on the stand, the lawyer said. There was no follow-up after she was released from the hospital, and she was handcuffed, arrested and sent to jail on Dec. 18, Mr. Buckley said.

During that time, the woman was taken to the courtroom to testify against Mr. Hendricks. He was convicted and sentenced to two life sentences without parole. A judge allowed her to go home on Jan. 14 — 27 days after she was jailed.

In a video statement that has been uploaded to YouTube, Devon Anderson, the county district attorney, said the rape victim had suffered through a life-threatening mental health crisis and had expressed her intention during the trial not to testify again.

“If nothing was done to prevent the victim from leaving Harris County in the middle of trial, a serial rapist would have gone free, and her life would have been at risk while homeless on the street,” Ms. Anderson says in the video.

“This was an extraordinarily difficult and unusual situation. There were no apparent alternatives that would ensure both the victim’s safety and her appearance at trial.”

Mr. Buckley, the woman’s lawyer, acknowledged that the woman had said she might not testify again. But he said that was “while she was having a mental breakdown.” He said county officials did not have the legal right to detain her since she lived outside Harris County — in an apartment in Longview, Tex. — and had not been subpoenaed.

Instead of putting the woman in jail, officials should have arranged with a community organization or provided a hotel room with a sheriff’s deputy as a chaperone, Mr. Buckley said.

“Had they done that, she would have testified, she would have testified well, and she would not have been abused in the jail,” he said.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said the woman was taken to jail after a district judge issued a bench warrant, ordering the sheriff’s office to detain her as a material witness.

“The sheriff’s office had no authority but to follow the court’s order to detain Jane Doe,” Ryan Sullivan, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said in a statement.

Mr. Sullivan said the woman would have been placed in a separate cell had the court ordered that she be kept separate from the general population, but no such order was issued.

The lawsuit says that when the woman was processed, she was accidentally classified as having committed a sexual crime, leading to negative treatment from the jail’s medical staff members who didn’t believe her protests.

She was in at least two physical confrontations while in jail. On Dec. 23, an inmate pushed her to the ground and repeatedly slammed her head into the concrete floor, according to the lawsuit. On Jan. 8, she suffered “an acute psychiatric episode,” the lawsuit says.

The prison guards’ response caused her to have a panic attack, during which “she became hysterical and physically uncontrollable,” the suit said. At one point, a guard punched her, causing a bruised eye socket, the lawsuit said.

She was also charged with felony aggravated assault but that charge was later dropped.

The Harris County Jail, one of the nation’s largest, has become known for allegations of deaths, beatings, civil rights abuses, unjust prosecutions and medical neglect, according to a six-part series in The Houston Chronicle.

Jane Doe’s lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages, names the Harris County sheriff, Ron Hickman; Taylor Adams, the prison guard; Nicholas Socias, an assistant district attorney; Harris County; and unnamed employees of the jail and the district attorney’s office.

In a statement, Rebecca White, the chief executive of the Houston-area Women’s Center, said, “We appreciate the importance of doing all we can to hold perpetrators accountable, but also believe that respecting the dignity of survivors and providing full support are paramount.”

Ms. White added that the group was “concerned that sexual assault is already underreported and that this may further deter survivors from coming forward.”